Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and other writings

"Tim Robinson, who died earlier this year, is undoubtedly one of the inspirations for this book. His maps of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara (his ABC as he called them) and the encyclopaedic books that accompany them are object lessons in the modern meaning of topography as an act of very, very close attention, of care as the core of understanding. His 1996 collection of essays, Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and other writings , contains his thinking about the nature of a shore and, beyond that, the essential unknowability of things, largely because of the fractal nature of reality. He had read, in a famous paper by Benoît Mandelbrot in Nature, how the length of anything expands according to the scale at which you measure it. The smaller the measure, the longer something becomes. Robinson had thought at first he could make a map of the shore of Connemara in all its wriggled, involuted complexity, but the Mandelbrot revelation revealed in a perfectly logical way that his ambition was meaningless. Reality will always outstretch any understanding of it and as Mandelbrot wrote, ‘coastline length turns out to be an elusive notion that slips between the fingers of those who want to grasp it’. This is what William Golding had meant. The world is not there to be lassoed. All we can do in the end is linger alongside it."